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Talk:Meg
I know this isn't the proper place for what I'm saying here, but I can't figure out how to start my own blog ex nihilo. :Go to View Profile, then Blog is an option. FYI. TR (talk) 06:22, August 12, 2018 (UTC) ::Ah, thanks. Turtle Fan (talk) 07:45, August 12, 2018 (UTC) I just saw the movie based on Alten's notorious Meg book after twelve years in development hell. Very, very loosely based on it, I should say. The backstory isn't too far off (though it's more dramatic and no doubt translates better to the screen than the book version would have) but everything else . . . You see bits and pieces here and there that hearken back to elements of the series (more from later stuff than from Book 1), but it's thrown into a whole new storyline. Jonas Taylor is the protagonist, but he doesn't seem much like I'd imagined. (Most damningly, he became a drunken ex-pat after his career ended rather than study marine biology and paleontology, so how he was able to pull up an encyclopedic knowledge of the Meg as soon as it appeared is a question with no clear answer.) His old friend is Mac (no full name given). The Japanese-American Tanaka family is more or less replaced with a family of Chinese nationals. Instead of a father with two adult children, it's a father, daughter, granddaughter. Jonas still gets the girl, though. A character named DJ is introduced in an early scene, played by a black actor and thus clearly not a relative. And he's got jack shit to do with DJ Tanaka. :Did he get eaten first? TR (talk) 06:22, August 12, 2018 (UTC) ::No, he survives. He plays the computer tech guy who freaks out (rightly so) because he didn't sign up for a job that includes such physical danger, but makes it to the end anyway. At one point he's panicking because he thinks he's going to drown, when the eight-year-old Chinese granddaughter says "Relax! You're wearing a life jacket!" It got a chuckle out of me. ::The first person to get eaten, by the way, is a Japanese submariner, though. Turtle Fan (talk) 07:45, August 12, 2018 (UTC) And while Jonas does eliminate the Meg by "making it bleed," there's no crawling around inside the beast's heart. Now failure to adhere to the source material, even to such a tremendous degree, does not necessarily make for a bad adaptation. Is this one any good? It's all right. Better than the reviews I've read suggest. Actually, it really reminds me quite a lot of the movie where John Barrowman improbably offers to take the girl home and eat her pussy, though it's a little easier to take seriously. Turtle Fan (talk) 06:13, August 12, 2018 (UTC) :The decision to finally push this thing into production after countless Megalodon films made on the cheap rendered this whole production at day late and a dollar short. Yeah, the book came first, but who's going to remember now, especially since the final product appears to be no different from all the other movies that got pushed out into the ether in the meantime. TR (talk) 06:22, August 12, 2018 (UTC) ::I do think it was strange that they finally got around to making this movie when they did after sitting on it for years and years. It should by rights have died, or more specifically, been miscarried. ::That being said, it wasn't made on the cheap. You've got the involvement of stars like Jason Statham and Rainn Wilson, a gorgeous location shot in coastal China, and excellent CGI. The plot is essentially the same as all those B movies (I wonder what relationship this had with Alten's inability to get this done for so long?) but it's done well both technically and artistically. I think it might be the new standard, the exemplar for what cheesy simplistic Meg movies can be. (And the . . . strangeness . . . of that description is not lost on me.) ::By the way, Alten's Meg-based airport novels are coming out more frequently than they used to, and the adventures are enjoyable. Unfortunately, he keeps coming out with more and more outlandish--and unnecessary--plot conveniences. In this summer's entry, Terry already has Parkinson's and is diagnosed with Stage IV melanoma on top of that. Her condition deteriorates rapidly, and a desperate experimental cancer treatment leaves her brain dead. Not comatose, in a permanent vegetative state. ::Only it's not so permanent as all that, because some dude shows up and says that his employer, whom he declines to name, is an admirer of the Taylors and has sent him to perform acupuncture as a gesture of good will. It later turns out that his employer owns an enormous medical research lab, so presumably there was more than acupuncture at work here, but no one ever thinks to look into that. After a couple sessions, Terry is cancer-free, Parkinson's-free, and not only conscious, but up and about, good as new. There's no muscle atrophy, no need for rehab of any kind. ::And two years ago, a character from another book by Alten, one that I did not think was part of the Meg series, shows up out of nowhere in the middle of the Taylors' adventure and says, essentially, "I'm going to tell you to do a lot of things that sound crazy, but you're going to have to do them, because the decisions you will make if left to your own devices will get us all killed. I've seen it happen once before, so I've time-travelled to set you on the right path now." Everyone just goes with it. ::Yet I keep coming back. . . . Turtle Fan (talk) 07:45, August 12, 2018 (UTC) :::I just read the book and watched the movie. While the latter is simply every Jaws knockoff with a bigger shark, the former is a poorly edited, atrociously worded mess which makes Dan Brown look like a great writer. And the misogyny - if that's an accurate portrayal of women, then I am so grateful to be a gay man.Matthew Babe Stevenson (talk) 10:49, May 7, 2019 (UTC) ::::It's been so long since I read the first that I really remember nothing about it, except crawling around inside the shark's heart. ::::Out of all of them, Hell's Aquarium is the one I remember enjoying most. I dare not suggest it's the best, if only because it's been ten years and I wouldn't care to trust my memory back that far. Turtle Fan (talk) 14:28, May 7, 2019 (UTC) :::::The two women are basically Lady Macbeth. Maggie is a ladder-climbing whore who uses and dumps men as often as she changes shoes, while Terry cares nothing for the fact that she's putting so many people in danger at every turn of her scientific expedition. The name Maggie sounds a bit like Meg, the designation given to the novel's main antagonist, a soulless killing machine who disembowels and eats her mate when he's been crippled by a wound and is of no more use to her - gee, symbolism and parallelism much? :::::To hammer home the point, Alten writes "As if one angry woman on-board wasn't enough, Jonas had to deal with Masao's daughter, who openly blamed him for having the audacity to suggest they capture the monster.... as Mac reminded Jonas, neither facts nor logic held any bearing on a woman. Mac was quick to point out that angry women came in threes; the third being a sixty foot, seventy thousand pound female shark."Matthew Babe Stevenson (talk) 18:15, May 7, 2019 (UTC) ::::::Yeah, that's . . . pretty unlovely. As I said, it's been so long that I barely remember the book. Turtle Fan (talk) 19:36, May 7, 2019 (UTC)